Best Practices and Strategies to Create Effective Visualizations

Aaron Williams

@awunderground

Best Practices and Strategies to Create Effective Visualizations

Why I Love R

Aaron Williams

@awunderground

1. Looks good!

Source: fivethirtyeight

2. Flexible

3. Reproducible

4. Scalable

AKA “Please just don’t make me point-and-click 100 charts”

5. In my analysis workflow

Source: Hadley Wickham

Source: ggplot2

fivethirtyeight

Financial Times

In the first edition of @FT's World Cup Extra series of stats-y briefings, @muradahmed and I ask: as curtain-raisers go, just how underwhelming is Russia vs Saudi Arabia?https://t.co/0aQXcaD9YV pic.twitter.com/GOXVyVlRW7

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) June 13, 2018

BBC

Leland Wilkinson

Grammar of Graphics

Hadley Wickham

A Layered Grammar of Graphics

Source: Hadley Wickham

1. Data

ggplot(data = )

2. Aesthetic mappings

aes(x = , y = , color = )

X or Y

Color or Fill

Aesthetic mappings

Size

Shape

Others: transparency, animations, faceting

3. Geometric objects

Plots are often referred to by the name of their geometric object(s).

Bar

geom_bar()

3. Geometric objects

Line

geom_line()

3. Geometric objects

Point

geom_point()

3. Geometric objects

?

3. Geometric objects

Path of Hurricane Katrina

4. Scales

Before

scale_x_continuous()

After

scale_x_log10()

4. Scales

Before

scale_size_continuous(breaks = c(25, 75, 125))

After

scale_size_continuous(range = c(0.5, 20), breaks = c(25, 75, 125))

5. Coordinate systems

Cartesian

5. Coordinate systems

Polar

coord_polar()

6. Facets (optional)

Facet wrap

facet_wrap(~category)

6. Facets (optional)

Facet grid

facet_grid(month~status)

7. Statistical transformations (optional)

Count

8. Themes

Default theme

8. Themes

fivethirtyeight theme

8. Themes

urbnthemes

Coding example

New? 9. Arrangements

New? 9. Arrangements

Animation

New? Interactivity

urbnmapr

Pension code

In directory

R Shiny

Graphics guide

1. Looks good!

A

2. Flexible

B

Once you understand ggplot2, it is really useful for doing 90% of the results with 10% of the effort

(Jennfer Hill)

3. Reproducible

A+

4. Scalable

B+

5. In my analysis workflow

A+